How can you have any doubts about the future viability of a website that already has 73 million registered users and is adding 250,000 new ones every day?

Those are figures to die for and that's even before you take into account that the majority of those many millions are teens - exactly the kind of market that every publisher and broadcaster wants to get their claws into.

The site in question is MySpace.com where every day is schoolies week and where millions of hormone charged tweens, teens and recently post-teens mingle, pose, share, swap and chat.

Peter Calveley, the Kiwi motion capture artist and one time student of patent law, is certainly a stirrer.

His decision to go after Amazon and its famous and much-valued 1-Click Patent in revenge for the slow delivery of a book (which they didn't even send to him - he merely bought the book from a third party through the Amazon site) is a great tale of persistence and determination.

He answered all my questions except for one - he wouldn't tell me what the name of his blog stands for: IGDMLGD.

"Only one other person in the world knows what that means," he told me. And there were no hints.

Four days ago I asked Lars Rasmussen, Google Australia's head engineer, when they would be getting around to putting Australia on the map - the Google Maps, that is.

(Lars, his brother Jens, and two Aussies, Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma, developed the mapping service which they sold to Google in 2004 and which then became Google Maps.)

The answer was evasive at best. Something along the lines of: "we're working on it" or "we don't preannounce things".

Well overnight (and we actualy checked Google Maps at 11.30pm last night and there was nothing except the capital cities on the map of Australia), Google launched its street level maps of major Australian and New Zealand cities.

We've had a record number of comments on the post about the proposed new copyright laws. That tells me that a lot of people are very unhappy about this assault on one of our most cherished rights: the right to record stuff from the TV, watch it whenever and however often we like, lend it to friends and family and leave it on the shelf until such time as we decide to tape something over it.

It's not a right, of course. It's actually a crime. Ever since the first VCR made its appearance in Australian homes in the (what?) '70s, we've all be breaking the law. But we like to think of it as a right. And it's become a right by virtue of the fact that almost everyone does it, some almost every day.

Google Australia this morning hosted what is possibly the best-attended IT press conference in Sydney for some time.

Between 50 and 60 hacks - reporters, photographers and cameramen - crowded into Google's modest offices to see the official opening of the local branch office and rub shoulders with the staff.

Ironically, the Google launch was held one floor under the executive suites and boardrooms the John Fairfax group, which owns this website and a stack of newspapers. In fact, the room we sat in to listen to the speeches was directly under the office of the Fairfax chief executive, David Kirk.

A nice juxtaposition of old media and new media. Fairfax just celebrated the 175th anniversary of its flagship newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald.

Under the Australian Government's proposed new copyright laws it will no longer be technically illegal to tape TV shows or rip tracks from your CD onto your iPod. That's the good part - getting rid of something that almost everybody had honoured in the breach.

But it replaces that stupid law with another stupider one - one that can never be properly policed and one which will continue to put almost everyone in breach of the copyright laws.

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